How to check if a company is real before you give them money

You are about to hand over money to a company you have never dealt with. A deposit on a flat. An advance to a supplier. Three months of notice period at a new job that is really a bet on the employer still existing in a year.

The website looks fine. Someone answered the phone. There is a GST number on the invoice.

None of that tells you whether the company exists.

That sounds dramatic, so here is the number. India’s companies register held more than 3.7 million companies and LLPs when we last pulled it. Of those, 939,392 have been struck off. That is one in four. Add the ones being wound up, amalgamated, liquidated or already dissolved and 29.3% of everything on the register is something other than Active.

So roughly three in ten times you look up a company, the answer is not the simple one you expected. That is not a reason to be frightened of doing business. It is a reason to spend two minutes before you spend anything else.

The two-minute check anyone can do, free

Five fields, no account, no payment. They come from MCA company master data, which the ministry publishes openly, and they cover every registered company and LLP in the country.

What you look up	What it actually tells you
Legal name	Whether the entity on the invoice is the entity that exists
CIN or LLPIN	The permanent identifier. Names change, this does not
Status	Whether it legally exists right now
Date of incorporation	How much history could possibly be behind it
State	Which registrar it answers to

Do them in that order. Each one can end the exercise.

Start with the name, and expect it to disagree

The single most common way this goes wrong is not fraud. It is that the name on the invoice is not the name on the register.

Trading names, brand names and legal names drift apart constantly. A business you know as one thing may be registered as something longer and duller with a “Private Limited” on the end. Sometimes there are two entities, an old one and a new one, and you are being invoiced by whichever is convenient.

Names are also less unique than people assume. Normalise away the punctuation and the suffixes across the register and 13,318 entities share a name with at least one other entity. That is a small share of 3.7 million, but it is thirteen thousand chances to look up the wrong company and feel reassured by someone else’s clean record.

Which is why the answer is never the name. It is the number.

Then get the CIN, and read it

A Corporate Identity Number is 21 characters, permanent, and unique to one company. Ask for it. A real business hands it over without blinking, because it is printed on their own filings. Hesitation here is itself information.

The CIN is also structured, so it answers questions before you open anything. Take an illustrative one, U68200TS2023PTC999999. It is not a real company’s:

• U says unlisted
• 68200 is the industry it registered under
• TS is Telangana
• 2023 is the year it was incorporated
• PTC is the company type
• the rest is its registration number in that state

Read left to right and you know roughly what you are dealing with. The year is the block most people should care about most: a company incorporated four months ago asking for a six-month advance is a different proposition from one that has been trading since 1994. Age is not quality. It just bounds how much history could exist.

If what you were given has fewer than 21 characters and a hyphen in it, you are probably holding an LLPIN, and you are dealing with a limited liability partnership rather than a company. It files different things.

There is more in how to read a CIN, including what each company type actually means.

Now the status, which is the one that matters

One word, and it can end the conversation.

Active means the registrar has not removed the company. That is all it means. It is a pulse, not a physical. A company can be Active while having filed nothing for three years and having pledged every asset it owns to a bank.

Strike Off means the registrar has removed it from the register. Whatever the website says, the entity you thought you were dealing with is no longer on the list of companies that exist. This is the second most common status on the register, which surprises people who assume it is exotic. If you are looking at one, take advice before you transact rather than after.

Under process of striking off means the removal has started. Read it as Strike Off with a countdown.

Dormant is the one that catches people out, because it sounds bad and is not. It is a formal, compliant way of staying in existence while inactive. Think hibernation rather than collapse. But a dormant company should not be sending you an invoice, so if one is, ask why.

Amalgamated, Dissolved, Liquidated all mean the company ended by a specific legal route. Whoever you were dealing with is now somebody else, or nobody.

Here is the whole register, by status, from our snapshot of 8 September 2026:

Status	Entities	Share
Active	2,597,823	70.70%
Strike Off	939,392	25.57%
Amalgamated	40,195	1.09%
Converted to LLP	29,512	0.80%
Under process of striking off	27,194	0.74%
Dissolved (Liquidated)	11,970	0.33%
Inactive for e-filing	10,261	0.28%
Under Liquidation	8,515	0.23%
Dormant under section 455	2,595	0.07%
Everything else	6,857	0.19%

The long tail matters less than the top two lines. Seven in ten Active, one in four struck off, and a small remainder in various stages of ending.

What each status actually means goes through them properly, including what to do when you see each one.

Six situations, and what each one should really check

The two-minute check is the same for everybody. What you do next is not.

You are taking a job. Status and age, then whether the company files. An employer that has stopped filing its annual returns is telling you something about its finances that the offer letter will not. If it is a young startup, the age block of the CIN plus the absence of filings is most of the picture you are going to get.

You are paying a deposit. To a builder, a landlord, a coworking operator, a travel or education agent. Status first, because handing a deposit to an entity that has been struck off is a problem you do not want to discover afterwards. Then charges, which is the register of what the company has already pledged to lenders. Money you hand over is not first in the queue behind a bank.

You are a freelancer taking on a first client. Status, age, and whether they file. You are extending credit whether or not you call it that: you do the work now and get paid later. Price that, and register yourself as a micro enterprise before you invoice rather than after: how to check a client before you take the work.

You are giving a new customer credit. Same as above with more at stake. This is the situation where the accounts are worth paying for, because the direction of travel over two years tells you more than any single figure. And if you are already past that point and the invoices have stopped being paid, the checks change: see what the filings tell you about whether a customer can pay.

You are putting money into someone else’s company. A friend, a relative, a former colleague. Shareholding and capital history, which live in the annual return. This is also the situation where people skip the check hardest, because asking feels rude. Ask anyway. A company that keeps clean filings will not mind.

You are buying equipment or a vehicle from a company. Charges, before anything else. An unreleased charge from years ago is the expensive surprise in asset deals, and it is sitting in a public filing the whole time.

When free is not enough

The free fields establish identity and existence. They contain no money.

Revenue, profit, who the directors are and when they changed, who owns the shares, what has been pledged to whom: all of that sits in filings the company has made with the registrar, and those are public but not free. The registrar charges for inspection. On MCA’s own portal that is ₹100 per company, ₹50 for an LLP, and paid access to what you bought stays open for seven days before it lapses. That ₹100 is the registrar’s fee, not a service charge, so it is what inspection costs however you go about it; what a single retrieval fee covers is a separate question.

The documents come in eight categories, one journey each, with a fresh CAPTCHA every few files and an encoded archive at the end rather than PDFs. That is the part people give up on, and it is why so many settle for a summary from a database that copied the same filings months ago without showing anyone the document.

Two honest limits before you spend anything:

The accounts are old. A company files its audited accounts months after the year they describe. There is no live revenue figure for a private Indian company, and anyone offering one is reading the same delayed filing.

They might not exist. A company in default may simply not have filed. That is a finding rather than a failure, and it is often the most useful thing you learn.

How to find out what a private company earns covers where the number lives and how far to trust it.

Four things the register will not tell you

Worth knowing before you lean on it.

It holds what was filed, not what is true. A document proves a filing was made on a date. It does not prove the contents were accurate. An auditor signing off means something, and it is not a guarantee.

It lags. Directors resign and the filing follows weeks later. Accounts arrive months after the year. Every field you read is a photograph of a moment that has already passed.

Absence is ambiguous until you check. A missing filing might mean default, or might mean the deadline has not arrived. Know which one you are looking at before you draw a conclusion.

It says nothing about behaviour. Plenty of companies with immaculate filings are difficult to work with, and plenty of good businesses are late with paperwork. The register tells you whether an entity exists and what it has declared. It does not tell you whether they will pay you on time.

What to actually do

1. Get the legal name and the CIN in writing, on the invoice, the offer letter or the agreement. Not the brand name.
2. Look the CIN up and check the status before any money moves.
3. Read the year of incorporation and ask whether the ask is proportionate to the age.
4. If the status is anything other than Active, stop and ask what is going on. You may get a perfectly good answer.
5. If the amount is material, pay for the filings and read the accounts and the charges. Two years of revenue beats one, and an unreleased charge is worth finding before you sign.
6. Record the CIN in your own files, not just the name. In five years it will still resolve to the same entity.

You can look up any Indian company or LLP on Entiva free, no account, and see the name, CIN, status, incorporation date and state straight away. When the answer is Active and the amount is large enough that you need what is behind it, the filings are a step away and you get the documents themselves.

The check costs two minutes. The alternative costs whatever you were about to hand over.

Figures in this post come from MCA company master data, as on 8 September 2026, covering the whole register of companies and LLPs. Registry fees and the seven-day access window are as observed on MCA’s View Public Documents service.